CONTEXT Residency directors require myriad skills to perform their jobs efficiently. However, many residency directors receive no training prior to obtaining their positions. OBJECTIVE To determine the effectiveness of the Residency Directors Residency Administration Program (RD RAP)--a 1-year fellowship training program for Ohio osteopathic residency directors sponsored by the Ohio Universit...

The paper illustrates how communication experiments may be carried out in a domestic recreational context. Participants situated in their homes were connected into group telephone conversations and simply asked to "chat and enjoy yourselves". Following the conversation, participants provided Likert scale ratings of the experience. In addition, the conversations were recorded and analysed. A tot...

A new measure of dispersion is introduced as a representation of consensus (agreement) and dissention (disagreement). Building on the generally accepted Shannon entropy, this measure utilizes a probability distribution and the distance between categories to produce a value spanning the unit interval. The measure is applied to the Likert scale (or any ordinal scale) to determine degrees of conse...

Both ontology builders and users need a way to evaluate ontologies in terms of usability, but existing ontology evaluation approaches do not fit this purpose. We propose the Ontology Usability Scale (OUS), a ten-item Likert scale derived from statements prepared according to a semiotic framework and an online poll in the Semantic Web community to provide a practical way of ontology usability ev...

Dipping my toe into the water of educational research, I have recently used Likert-type rating scales to measure student views on various educational interventions. Likert scales are commonly used to measure attitude, providing a range of responses to a given question or statement . Typically, there are 5 categories of response, from (for example) 1 1⁄4 strongly disagree to 5 1⁄4 strongly agree...

OBJECTIVE We investigated elementary school children's ability to use a variety of Likert response formats to respond to concrete and abstract items. METHODS 111 children, aged 6-13 years, responded to 2 physical tasks that required them to make objectively verifiable judgments, using a 5-point response format. Then, using 25 items, we ascertained the consistency between responses using a "go...

The Female Condom Attitudes Scale is an instrument comprising five correlated factors derived from 15 Likert-scale survey items that measure women's attitudes toward the female condom. This scale originated from the 30-item scale of Choi, Gregorich, Anderson, Grinstead, and Gómez (2001; manuscript under review). Exploratory factor analysis of this scale extracted eight correlated factors. Relia...